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Recommended html page width???????????????????

Hello! CowGirl here!

I am designing a background website and am wondering how wide (in pixels) the fixed width pages of my website should be. Naturally, I would prefer to avoid horizontal scrolling. According to w3schools.com, in January 2013 90% of their visitors had screen resolution higher than 1024x768 pixels. Thus, in theory one can use a page width of 1100 (or even a bit more) pixels without causing any horizontal scrolling (see http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/br...ion_higher.asp).

One would think websites would happily take advantage of all this available space and design their websites accordingly. BUT a sample of popular websites shows they use flexible width pages that can go way below 1024 before they pages require horizontal scrolling (for example, no horizontal scrolling for pinterest.com until the browser window is reduced to a width of 932 pixels).

The fact that some of the popular websites are set up this way leads me to wonder if I should design my webpage so that with a 933 pixel width browser window there is no horizontal scrolling? Or am I concerning about nothing and should I design my webpage so that any browser window with a width of 1100 pixels causes no horizontal scrolling?

I will be designing a mobile version of my website, so I think the above question only relates to desktop users of my website.

The idea of responsive screen designs is to avoid the need for separate sites for mobile devices. When hand-held devices had truly tiny screens, there was no alternative, but if you take 480px as the minimum screen width to design for, and around 900px as the maximum, you can do it with a responsive design. You could allow up to 1920px if you like, but, in my experience, it is not practical. Nor do I generally want a single window to occupy that much screen acreage, even though I have a two-screen layout, with an old 17 inch monitor adding more desktop to an 1080p main monitor.